Search Engine Market Share Statistics – February 2012

Now that we are into the second month of 2012, how has the market share for the search engines changed in both the UK and the US? Heading into the new-year, we previously mentioned that Bing started off well in the US, and Yahoo had not done so well, partly due to Bing overtaking them earlier on. This position has been maintained by Bing for February 2012.

In relation to the UK market, Bing’s share has dropped slightly, however they are still placed above Yahoo overall. All in all, Google, Yahoo and ‘Other’ sites saw a slight increase, whilst Ask and Bing saw the opposite, with a small decrease.

Looking at the results for the UK search engine market share, the statistics provided by Hitwise (relevant up to 18/02/2012) show that Google are once again dominating the market with a 90.98% stake. Interestingly, this is an increase of 0.14% up from the previous month for the search engine giants, although the figures won’t have a dramatic impact given their huge market share.

Referring to the table and pie chart below, we can see that Bing, the search engine that is taking the largest share away from Google has dropped 0.10% to 3.73%. This is still an improvement on the figures from the later part of 2011 when in November they had a 3.57% share. Although this is a slight drop, Bing are still growing from previous months, but how much will they take away from Google in the coming months?

With the increase for Google as well, competition is proving to be tough, with only ‘Other’ sites and Yahoo seeing a delicate rise of 0.03% and 0.01% respectively. The increase for Google could be down to people adapting and getting used to Search Plus Your World as more people have turned their attention back to Google after working out how this new function works. Moving forward it will be interesting to see if Yahoo can gain any of the market share back from Bing; for the mean time however, they are leading the way when it comes to those with a smaller share of the market.

In relation to the US and the figures taken from ComScore, Google have again seen an increase of 0.30%, whilst Bing hold second place with 15.2%. Yahoo have once again dropped 0.40% to 14.10% overall which means that they will face an even tougher task trying to climb back to the number two spot. The on-going struggle that Yahoo has been facing makes us wonder what will be in store for the search engine during 2012?

Ask also saw a decrease, down 0.08% and this has resulted in an increase of 0.03% for ‘other’ sites. Be sure to check out the search engine statistics for March 2012 next month.

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John works as a Content Marketing Executive at Koozai. With previous experience in PR, he helps the team by writing a range of client content including press releases, guest blog posts and website copy. He is also a regular contributor to the Koozai blog.

3 Comments

Nice write up John. Interesting to see Bing overtake Yahoo as the second most popular search engine in the US, and maintain that this month. This will be a really interesting year for search engines, and one that I think Bing should capitalise on, especially seeing as Yahoo are slowly faltering. Whatever happens though, it’ll take a gallant effort from any search engine to overhaul the search lord.

I agree, Google have such a dominant stake in the market in both the UK and the US but there is everything to play for when it comes to the smaller or less popular search engines behind Google. They have their own competition taking place but obviously any percentage increase that they gain, they take away from Google’s revenue. I think Bing are doing well and it will be interesting to see if they can keep gaining ground and maintain second place in the coming months.

What do you think?

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